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Since the early 2000s, popular culture has experienced a “Zombie Renaissance,” beginning in film and expanding into books, television, video games, theatre productions, phone apps, collectibles and toys. Zombies have become allegorical figures embodying cultural anxieties, but they also serve as models for concepts in economics, political theory, neuroscience, psychology, computer science and astronomy. They are powerful, multifarious metaphors representing fears of contagion and doom but also isolation and abandonment, as well as troubling aspects of human cruelty, public spectacle and abusive relationships. This critical examination of the 21st-century zombie phenomenon explores how and why the public imagination has been overrun by the undead horde.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments (ix)Preface (1)

Introduction. A Multiplicity of Zombies: How the Walking Dead Conquered Popular Culture (5)

I. Generic Triad1. The (New) Cinematic Zombie: Road Trips, Globalization and World War Z (23)2. The Comedic Zombie: Zombieland and the Classical Functions of the Modern Zomedy (41)3. The Young Adult Zombie: Teenage Anxiety in The Forest of Hands and Teeth (55)

II. Beyond Film4. The Comic Book Zombie: Human Devolution in The Walking Dead (73)5. The Literary Zombie: The Infected City of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (89)6. The Stage Zombie: Dead Set, Uncle Vanya and Zombies, and the ­Reality-TV Monster (107)

III. Broader Horizons7. The Video Game Zombie: The Last of Us and the Digital Evolution of the Walking Dead (131)8. The ­Non-Zombie Zombie: The Tragically Misidentified Draugar of Dead Snow (148)9. The Romantic Zombie: Warm Bodies and the Monstrous Boyfriend (163)

Conclusion. The Television Zombie: The Future(s) of the Walking Dead (181)